It's nice to be appreciated

We like to help out where we can by offering our services to a local school to help promote their Summer and Christmas fairs - and so were delighted when we received not only a bottle of Pimms but this delightful "ice cream' themed thank-you card from a future designer/typographer in class 2B.

In reply we'd like to say: Thank-you for the "thank you" & excellent design work, well done.

Mongolian British Chamber of Commerce Identity and Website

The Mongolian economy is expected to grow at an increasing rate over the next few years, as the yet untapped copper reserves at Oyu Tolgoi (possibly the largest copper reserve in the world) and others mines are set to become available. With that Mongolia is likely to become the focus of massive international investment as it's neighbours to the south and north (Russia and China) likely to be  Mongolia's first customers for Mongolia's resources. These developments mean there are opportunities for British expertise in the this region, hence the newly established Mongolian British Chamber of Commerce.

We have just produced this logo for the Chamber, along with developing a website with our Digital Partner DJA Online.

The logo incorporates elements from the Mongolian flag combined with the British Red White and Blue: The symbols from the flag have deep cultural meaning within Mongolia and we have been careful to be respectful :  The fire at the top of it represents prosperity, contentment and regeneration. The three flames represent the past, present and future. The sun and moon symbolize the universe and are believed by Mongolians to be the mother (sun) and father (moon) of their nation. The triangles pointing at the ground are arrowheads and represent Mongolian's willingness to defend their nation. The horizontal rectangles stand for honesty, justice and righteousness. The middle circle can be interpreted as the Buddhist yin and yang symbol, which represents complementary opposite forces existing together in the universe - such as positive and negative, male and female, passive and active, fire and water, etc. The circle can also be interpreted as two fish that never close their eyes, representing the watchfulness and vigilance of Mongolians. The vertical rectangles represent pillars which symbolize strength, resolve and hardness. We have worked this into a typographic arrangement, to create a unified logo type that is both British and Mongolian.

The goal of the identity is to represent the spirit of economic co-operation being forged between Britain and Mongolia.

Beer Infographic

Quick Website

We've just set up a very simple website using Flavors.me, an easy-to-use online website creation tool - and all for under £30 (not including the person of hours, writing, design etc).

http://flavors.me is simple to use. They supply hosting and a domain purchasing service, so all you need to do is create the content and upload it to one of their free or premium templates. You can also pull content from other sites like Flikr, YouTube, and SoundCloud so that your site has a rich media feel, and as standard all the social media tools one needs are there to let the world know you're new site is up.

In the above example we created a nostalgia site for a band that no longer plays together, but is fondly remembered. Being a band they had plenty of artwork and photography to choose from, plus songs and some fan made videos. After a few minutes of familiarising ourselves with the flavors.me controls, we were building the site, creating pages with music from SoundCloud, videos from YouTube and a map from Google.

The design controls are pretty intuitive too, allowing you upload background images, change the colour and transparency of overlays and choose from a huge family of fonts of which you can customise size and colour. You can add pictures to the text pages, however to do this you need know a little about ftp and html. You also set up a contact form to receive comments form visitors and create links to your favorite sites.

While it's not the perfect solution for every need - it has many design customisation limitations -  for this particular project it was perfect.

It's also perfect learning tool if you are new to web building - it's a great way to use trial ideas to get accustomed what works and what doesn't, because you can quickly test designs, font sizes and add and take away content with a click. For the novice enthusiast this is a great way to learn and showcase your work.

Some new infographics:

The mobile phone infographic was inspired by a news report we heard yesterday about the National Billmonitor Mobile Report, that studied 28,000 mobile phone bills and calculated that in the UK nearly £5bn is wasted annually by subscribers being on the wrong contract.

They state that most subscribers overestimate how minutes a month they use their phone, to avoid "billshock". And they conclude that the £5bn figure is set to rise as more and more users are adopt smartphones for internet access and downloading data to their handsets.

Below is a time line of "platinum events" produced for the Platinum Guild.

Concept for this years' Festival

We liked these...

by Photographer Oli Kellett

It's quite common to find AMERICAN towns named after noted BRITISH places:

See the full set here...